President Donald Trump just announced plans to declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory following the defeat of Iran.
‘Pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States… we have the blockade… no ships get through unless we want them to,’ Trump declared at a Garden City rally.
Trump told a crowd of law enforcement officers that the war in the Middle East is still not over.
‘We have to make a little journey to the Middle East because we have to put out a potential disaster, a potential very big fire, a fire like you’ve never seen. We can’t let Iran keep going,’ Trump said during the rally, adding once again that they can ‘never have a nuclear weapon.’
Before the US launched military strikes against Iran earlier this year, the Strait of Hormuz served as a vital shipping lane for global oil.
Since the onset of the conflict, maritime traffic through the narrow waterway has ground to a near-total halt, making transit rights a key sticking point in US–Iran peace negotiations.
Speaking to supporters on Long Island, the president called for economic resilience amid the war with Iran, urging Americans to accept temporary gas price surges as a matter of national priority.
‘For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a… it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world… We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon,’ Trump said in an address at the Nassau County Policy Academy.
Tehran has since walked away from Trump’s peace deal, attacking vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil
Trump delivers remarks at the David S. Mack Center for Training and Intelligence on August 14, 2026 in Garden City, New York
President Donald Trump just announced plans to declare the Strait of Hormuz a US territory following the defeat of Iran
While violence has declined since the signing of a preliminary US-Iran deal in June and the Lebanon-Israel agreement, Lebanon continues to report intermittent Israeli strikes and artillery shelling on the south
‘Remember that when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4,’ the president continued, saying, he will ‘never apologize.’
‘I did the right thing,’ he exclaimed.
The national average gas price stands at more than $4 per gallon in the US.
The rising prices have added inflationary pressure on families as Trump prepares for midterm elections in less than three months.
Iran plans to ramp up aggression in the Strait of Hormuz to ratchet pressure on Trump ahead of the midterm elections, according to Tehran insiders and foreign policy experts.
Trump conceded last week that the US was now ‘low-keying’ peace talks with Iran after a ceasefire deal collapsed.
Former US diplomat Jonathan Wachtel told the Daily Mail that ‘Iranian leaders carefully study both American military capabilities and political calendars.’
Two Iranian sources familiar with Tehran’s planning confirmed that the midterms are a key pressure point that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will hope to exploit.
Retired General Jack Keane said that Iran is gambling on Trump being unwilling to restart major military action ahead of November.
‘My gut feel is that they’re likely going to get more aggressive because they don’t believe the President will do much prior to the midterms in terms of military actions,’ Keane told Fox News.
Wachtel agreed ‘this is a high–risk gamble,’ adding that ‘major confrontations often begin when one side misunderstands the other’s willingness to respond.’
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